I'm Mora Aronsmeli, and this is the anxious achiever.

Each episode, we look at stories from business leaders who have dealt with anxiety, depression, or other mental health challenges,

how they fell down, how they pick themselves up, and how they hope workplaces can change in the future.

I doubt that there is a person in the world who would disagree that running a business is stressful.

I mean, you could be the world's most chill person, but a few months into managing your own venture, I am willing to bet you might be losing some sleep.

It's part of the package.

I think when you run your own shop, no matter how small or how big it is. I mean, I have heard the same fears and anxieties spoken by the founders of spanks and jet blue, giant

companies, for example, as I have heard from friends who run really small consulting firms or

catering companies or small nonprofits. Can I make payroll? Is this all going to fall apart like a house

of cards? Are my competitors catching

up to me? Am I the right person to be leading this venture? But I think the difference between

those who make it work and those who fail is resilience, which is itself a form of courage and

strength. So today we're going to discuss how to build your resilience muscles

with Cheryl Conti. Cheryl is the award-winning CEO and co-founder of the firm Do Big Things,

and before that she was CEO Efficient Strategy. She's also co-founder of the social marketing software

attentively, which was the first tech startup with a black

female founder in history to be acquired by a NASDAQ traded company. Before all that, Conti co-founded

Jack and Jill Politics, where she wrote as Jill Tubman on the leading black audience targeted

blog during the 2008 and 2012 election cycles with her co-founder

Baratunde Thurston, who was Jack.

We'll talk about that a little bit, too.

We met in a very different era, I think, of both of our lives in politics in the early 2000s.

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